Wednesday, 18 June 2014

I present to you my negative CV.
Rather than list all my successes (as I do here), here I’m listing all
the jobs I haven’t been offered, all the papers I’ve had rejected, and all the
awards I haven’t been given.

Before I start, I should probably
note that I’m not doing badly at present. I had a successful PhD, and am in my third
year of a five year post-doc. I have several publications, and was even lucky
enough to win a prize for my PhD work. It would be dishonest to claim I’m not
doing reasonably well, but I certainly know individuals with ‘stronger’ CVs –
prestigious fellowships, publications in ‘big’ journals etc. My point in
opening up my CV is more to show the extent of rejection that has gone with the
successes I have had. This might offer hope to PhD students, suggesting that
rejections don’t spell the end of their career, or it could provoke anxiety, wondering how they could put up with so much rejection (or even that they've been at the recieving end of a lot more rejection). Regardless, I hope that
the information is useful for some. Whether or not potential future employees
will regard it as ‘useful’ is another matter, but one I will have to cope with
when the time comes.

Educations & Jobs:

2005

Apply for PhD position @
Cambridge – rejected

Apply for PhD position @ York –
rejected

2009

Apply for post-doc position @
Cambridge – rejected

Apply for College fellowship @
Cambridge – rejected

2010

Apply for Wellcome fellowship –
rejected

Apply for MRC fellowship –
rejected

Apply for ESRC fellowship –
rejected

Apply for post-doc position @
Oxford – rejected

Apply for post-doc position @
Birkbeck – rejected

2011

Apply for British Academy fellowship
– rejected

Awards and Prizes

2010

Nominated for BPS postgrad award
– nope

2011

Nominated for BPS postgrad award –
nope

Nominated for EPS Frith Prize award
– nope

2013

Nominated for BPS postgrad award –
nope

Publications

2008

Submit to Neuroimage – rejected

2010

Submit to Neuropsychologia –
rejected

2012

Submit to Nature Neuroscience –
rejected

Submit to Neuron – rejected

Submit to Science – rejected

2013

Submit to PLOS: Biology –
rejected

Submit to PNAS – rejected

Submit to PLOS: Biology –
rejected

Submit to PNAS – rejected

As can been seen, I’ve been
rejected a few times since 2005 (this doesn't include undergrad courses I was rejected from). I’ve no idea what the average rate of
rejection is for someone at a similar stage in their career. I was relatively
selective in applying for post-docs in or around the London area (for personal
reasons), so perhaps applied for fewer jobs than others might do when finishing
their PhD. Who knows. What is clear is that in order to have even a small
amount of success you need to keep banging on the door until someone lets you
in. The only reason I got into Cambridge to do a PhD was because I went away,
did an MSc, and reapplied the following year with a stronger CV. The only
reason I won an award for my PhD work was because my PhD supervisor was willing
to repeatedly nominate me over three successive years.

I think two points stem from
this: (1) get used to rejection, it is part of the job and (2) find a way to
channel rejection into something productive. The easiest thing to do when you
have a paper rejected is to sit on it for a few months – the best thing to do
is to work on it straight away. That exasperated annoyance you get when
reviewers/editors haven’t realised the brilliance of your manuscript? Use it to
make your paper better and submit it somewhere else (although perhaps wait a
day or two just to calm yourself down a little bit first…).

Note – although every attempt has
been made to ensure this CV is accurate, it was actually surprisingly difficult
to retrace my steps (at least is terms of rejection). It seems even electronic
memory has a positive bias.